The Shadow Riders was made into a successful television movie in 1982. A sign of its popularity and relative quality as a television movie is its reshowing numerous times since its first broadcast. The movie starred Sam Elliott (Dal), Tom Selleck (Mac), Jeff Osterhage (Jesse) as the Traven brothers and Katherine Ross (Kate Connery) as the love-interest. The first half of the movie follows the book rather closely, but the second half veers off, especially when Kate dresses as a nun to visit the imprisoned women to tell them of the escape plan. In an interview published at the end of The Shadow Riders, L'Amour expressed general satisfaction with the movie, although he felt that the action he provided in the novel needed no expansion.